Page 13 of Crowned

Just five weeks ago I was filthy, hungry, and hiding in barns, an escapee from Konstantin’s crazy pageant. Now I’m walking quietly at my father’s side while my stomach churns, once again a prisoner of a dominating, controlling man.

Out of the frying pan. Into the fire.

We sit at a café table very close to the one I was sitting at this morning. Dad opens his mouth, but I interrupt him and get straight to the point. “I’m not getting married again.”

His lip curls as the waiter arrives at our table and he sits in hostile silence while I order espressos and glasses of water.

“You must marry. What else are you good for?”

Even after all these years, Dad’s cruel barb finds its mark in my heart. “You seem to believe that I’m still yours to order around.”

“Who else do you belong to you?” he asks, eyes narrowing as if searching for dirty male handprints all over my body. They’re there if only he looks close enough. Three sets of them.

I lean forward as if I’m about to tell Dad a secret. “I have some surprising news for you. I belong to me.”

Dad brushes that aside with a flick of his hand. When our espressos are set before us, he stirs a spoonful of sugar into his hot coffee. “What could you even manage alone? You don’t know how to do anything.”

“I’m working as a runway model. I’m carving out a life for myself. I won’t be forced into another loveless marriage with a man of your choosing.”

The gentle clinking of the spoon in his coffee cup becomes a rattle. “You will do what you’re told, or your preciousbabulyawill be thrown out onto the street to die in the gutter.”

This is the threat that he’s held over my head since I was eighteen.Babulya’shome and the money that pays for her food and insulin all comes from my father, and he could cut her off in a heartbeat, but I shake my head. “That won’t work anymore.”

“Why? Do you not love your precious grandmother anymore?”

I blink, tears pricking my eyes as I remember what she told me two years ago when I escaped my father’s house. It was the last time I saw her. “Babulyasaid she will step into traffic if I disobey her by walking down the aisle with another man of your choosing.”

Dad’s face turns mottled red with barely suppressed rage. “You’re lying.”

I wish I were. “Babulyahardened her heart to her granddaughter for years in order to trick you into handing me over to her. You think she wouldn’t take her own life to keep me from marrying another man like you?”

“That vicious old bitch,” he seethes.

Clever old bitch, actually. A clever woman who taught me all I know.

I pick up my espresso and take a sip. “I don’t want us to fight, Dad. If it’s so shameful that your daughter is out in the world all by herself, then I’ll come and live at home. But I won’t give up my job.”

It’s the right thing to say. Defiant enough to seem believable, but not so disobedient that I’m capsizing the boat.

Dad sits back and glares at me, a muscle in his jaw pulsing. “Is there a man that I don’t know about?”

I burst out laughing. Genuine laughter. “I assure you that there isn’t. Not one man. Not two men, or even three.”

“You can have six months working at your little job, and then you will marry.”

I take another sip and think about this. “You seem very confident that any man in your circle will want to marry me after my last husband had his brains splattered all over the street because of me.”

Dad slams his palm on the table, and our cups and saucers rattle. “Do not repeat those filthy lies, even as a joke. Once you are home I will be able to present my obedient daughter to the world and clear your name.”

Maybe he can, or maybe he can bully enough people into taking his side, but anyone desperate enough to marry me under those circumstances would probably treat me worse than Ivan did.

“Twelve months working as a model,” I counter.

“You will be twenty-one,” Dad seethes, as if it’s disgusting that a woman can be such an age and unmarried.

“Exactly. So old that the modeling industry will be ready to spit me out. I’ll have no choice then but to take whichever bully you decide should wed me.”

Tension crackles between us. A woman is daring to negotiate with the great Aran Brazhensky.

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